Of course, aetherspace will not be shrunk. That's the most suggestion I've heard yet.

There are other ways to make aetherspace fighting more interesting!

I have been working on a revamp of the Aethersurfing skillset idea I came up with and posted a while back, focusing on traveling fast to aetherbubbles and collecting auronidion particles, but I don't have it with me at the moment. I'll post it up later sometime today. It doesn't have any abilites for directly attacking and killing aetherbeasts, as I didn't want it to take away the need for aethercrews - but some poeple seem to want that. It does have a few abilites to compliment ship-to-ship fighting.

Put flashpoints back to being used from any plane on aetherspace to any plane on aetherspace. It was bad enough only having 3 flashpoints and a major complaint that 3 was to few, so when the changes went in for aetherspace the last time, instead of bumping up some more flashpoints and/or letting the pilot(read: Commander) only set them but anyone "piloting" use them, you made them even more annoying to use.

Edited for word clarification.

Let me see if I can't add a few more things to this topic.

First of all, I want to echo for the Nth time that you should drastically increase the experience gained from hunting in aetherspace, as well as implementing some sort of system that will give greater reward in return for greater participation.

The idea of somehow allowing for crew change midflight would also make things more enjoyable for most, since going on an expedition in aetherspace can eat up more time than going for a Domoth. I'll understand it if this isn't implemented though, as I guess it'd be a bit wonky to explain. Perhaps allow this through some sort of mini-flashpoint, that allows you to return to the "home-dock" of the ship, dock, change crew and then flash back to where you left off.

I agree on Catarin's idea, in that there should be a list of prices for the Aethergoods on the Facility. As it is, the Facility is perhaps the worst bubble of them all due to it being dull, poor hunting and the quest being completely ridiculous. If there was a list there that'd inform us about what the current market in aethertrade is, it'd both give us a reason to visit the place, and allow for quicker (and in my opinion more fun) aethertrading.

Speaking of bubbles, I think that brushing them up a bit could be a good idea. I'll give my suggestions for each of them.

Facility: The worst of the worst. Only the tower in the centre has an appealing feel to it. Most of the bubble consists of wall upon wall with stupidly enduring, health-draining slugs. The elevator is neat, and the mysterious gnomish experiment is fun in concept, but it is done bad in execution. I'd like a bit more reason to move around in the tower, make more of the quest happen there. As it is, the quest is basically bashing, bashing and then even more bashing until you're about ready to throw up. Add a bit puzzle to the tower, make the gnomes drop vague clues and hints about it, but never enough to find out what it actually is. The quest needs to be reworked anyway. Reduce the luck component, since it's so incredibly frustrating to have all the colours but one completed, and then get rejected again and again due to "inferior specimens". Give us some way to identify the inferiority of these specimens at least.

Crumkindivia: From the worst to the best. Crum has a relaxed, even funny, feel to it. Both the sides are equally lunatic and dangerous (the only one I can sympathise with at least, is Ladyfinger), the pay in gold and experience is good considering the difficulty of it. What I would suggest though, is to give an honours line for completing either side of the quest. Preferably a seperate one for each. It adds to the feeling of having made an impact on the bubble, and allows for weeding out those who break the laws by doing the bad quest... (What!? Honours is IC. It is the public records as kept in the World Library. So there.) In addition, move a gingerbread man away from Ladyfinger and Muffinman and put them wandering around instead so that the main denizens are equally protected. That might actually mean that you should move both gingerbreadmen away from Muffin, since he has Doughboy but... well, I'll let you make a judgement call on that.

Cankermore: It's a neat bubble. The Allisaur deal some pretty hefty damage and bleeding, but the experience they give makes up for it. What I would suggest though, is to either increase the payout from helping either commander, increase the advantage of having a unit attack another unit that is weak to it (such as attacking Mugwumps with Igasho) or both.

Xion: Awesome. Pure, undilluted awesome. Whenever I am on the bubble alone, I can just close my eyes and find myself completely immersed in the bubble. I become my character, lost and fearful as I slowly crawl through the alien surroundings, always watching out so I'm not swallowed by some shadow, or killed by the security systems. It gets an A+ for feel and flavour. Unfortunately, there are a few things that should be fixed. The quest in Xion, while awesome, is a bit wonky. It is difficult to figure out the order of how you should do things, as the crystal you're trying to help doesn't seem completely aware of what's going on around it. Making things clearer, at least the order of how the things should be done. It's bothersome to keep finding out that you should've done B first, then A. But maybe that's just me. I haven't completed the quest itself yet (since it is difficult to get a crew to help with the hunting, and it's not suitable to do alone (DON'T CHANGE THAT. Group quests make Lusternia more fun)), but I heard that once you complete the quest, nothing really happens. If that's true, fix it.

Dramube: This bubble has a great feel, but it didn't really appeal to me when I visited it. Maybe it will when I visit it again. Anyway, I can't comment much on this, except that I've heard rumours that the quest here is bugged. Can someone confirm/deny that?

Frosticia: I like it, but it should be colder. You should be taking frost damage and get randomly afflicted with cold based afflictions if you're not clothed for the trip. Having to clothe yourself for harsh weather conditions will be a great addition of flavour. I haven't even attempted the quest here, so I can't comment on that. However, in general I like this bubble.

Night/Moon: Never really visited. Can't comment.

That's all for now. Maybe more later.

Perhaps a similar merchant's ledger that gives general area location and pricelist of each ship when you LEDGER . Also, a list of the ship names might be helpful too since we can use POLITICS to show all ship names. Alternatively, you can just add this on to the effect of the current ledger.

Yeeeaaah, no. 10 power, plus the count at which aetherbeasties are too painful to deal with: <1. I can't sit and tank a -single- aetherbeast as it stands right now, because they damage hull and modules. Fleeing and shooting is the only way to deal with them, and even with a 3man crew, killing even a mere hydrian takes quite some doing.


2x deepnight sized, with 10 turrets and 3 grids.


I learned to read maps REALLY REALLY freaking well. I always pull up the aetherspace map on a second monitor when I go flying. Admittedly, not everyone has (or even should have) access to a second monitor, so... meh.


==================
I'd like a navpoints-type thing for aetherspace, so that you can plot out a route. Maybe make it a city upgrade, like an Aether Map Room, in a room just off the aetherplex chamber-place, where you can PLOT ROUTE which takes you into a something that lets you drop markers in aetherspace, that then show up as "Navpoint 1 is to the " when you're in aetherspace, regardless of how far away you are from it. Then, when you get there, Navpoint 1 goes away and you get "Navpoint 2 is to the ". It'd certainly help with the getting lost bit. If you wanted to take it to the next (very awesome) level, you could PILOT FOLLOW ROUTE and the aethership would do its best to proceed from navpoint to navpoint using a pathfinding algorithm that shouldn't be too hard to write, though you could add errors and whatever, since from what I know algonthorines aren't particularly intelligent. You could make it so that if the straight-line path is obstructed by anything it shrieks and wails and whatever.

For another idea, perhaps add an Aether Comm Center. I really like moving it to the whole fleet-type idea, with war rooms and stuff, a la Star Wars Battle of Yavin. People at the Comm Center could communicate with any empath on any ship, and then have a skill in empathy that links the -entire- ship to the Comm Center. COMM CONNECT , which will give you access to that ship's SHIPT. Of course, this should only be able to be done to ships linked to the aetherportal. This would help a LOT in the coordination, give what in my opinion is a really nice feel to aether combat, and be overall really spiffy. If you wanted to take it to the next, even more awesome level, add the option to place a radar station at the dock/nexus world wherever and get a 5+ (upgradeable with auronispheres?) room radius COMM LOOK, similar in appearance to SHIP LOOK. Think tactical strategy board. Not only would this add even more flavour to aetherspace, it'd give it a more public space/face and be accessible to more people. To give it a truly epic feel, make it have room-based commands, like the aetherway portals so that anyone present can use them (represented by banks of stations).

Taking the previous idea to something that other people are suggesting and to something that I'd also like to see, your city could pay for some fat upgrade, costing power, comms, gold, auronispheres, whatever and establish a commlink to the Facility, granting access to a tactical map that gives the rough locations of all gnome trading ships. COMM CONNECT FACILITY. And then COMM CONNECT GNOME to ask their current prices. I mean, we get aetherwave broadcasting centres, and ship to ship communication. I feel that this is just the next logical step to making aetherspace more friendly and accessible.

My goal with these ideas is to keep with the organized group feel of aetherspace while opening it up and making it easier to coordinate the distances involved without giving all pilots carpal tunnel syndrome or negating the uses of flashpoints.
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tl;dr version:

Navpoints
-includes basic ship AI that can follow navpoints so long as there is an unobstructed straight line between points.
Comm centre
-Communicate with players on ships
-Communicate with gnome ships to facilitate finding prices, w/e
-Short range Radar! Whee!

This isn't as big of a thing to 'fixing' aetherspace, but it would be a nice tweak in a skill because there are no envoys to submit this to.

when using the Empathic skill of distribute, it is supposed to only lower the power of a module and boost the strength of another. However, as it works now, Modules under 100%, in addition to having their (for turrets) damage lowered, (grid) healing powers reduced, (chair) movement speed lowered, they have a high chance of failing to work as if they were damaged.

I have two suggestions for tweaking this (one or the other or both will work fine):

1) Simply remove the penalty of chance to malfunction if power is at less than 100%

2) Add the additional effect of increasing the speed at which modules over 100% can operate. A speed bonus essentially to compensate for the malfunctioning of other modules.

Ninjad really heh.

The power reserves of a ship is a slight concern (To me, at least.) The power regenerates too slow and is extremely limited especially when there are five total modules which use power.

Two suggestions:

1) Increase the speed at which ships regenerate power.

2)Increase the total amount of power in the ship prompt to 20 instead of 10. This opens more possibilities during aethercombat. Right now during aethercombat the ship is limited to either saving the power for spiral, worworble(sp?) and that 10p empath ability which heals all modules (I think that is what it does, someone correct me if I'm wrong)

Edit: Oh yes ship feats. When a turret uses strip (costs 3 power) and misses, the power is still consumed. Would be nice if ship feats like this that miss the targets cost zero power if missed.

All combateer moves work like this actually, which results in us never use them (even if we didn't just need the power for spiral.)

Btw, rather than 10p, it'd have to be 15 to stop you being able to do two consecutively. Not sure how much this would help, either, you'd still end up saving 10p for spiral and just have 5 left over for regenerating into the next spiral faster...

EDIT: Nm, update to spiral.

What's the fusion change?

COMMANDER - FUSION

Syntax: PILOT FUSE FLASHPOINT
PILOT FUSE SHIP
PILOT FUSE BERTH
Module: Command Chair
Power: 10

Fusing with the presence of a flashpoint or with a ship that your empath
has synchronized with will cause your ship to travel to that flashpoint
or ship.


What I've HEARD (correct me if I'm wrong somebody) Is that berth takes you to the aetherplex.

Edit: Basically like a 'teleport nexus' for ships.

Could someone post the AB's for the new skills? Interested in what they do.

...so...an upgrade to fusion. Great.

The ability to board and raid other ships would be really neat.

Oh! Crashed ships that you can board, also, with loads of goodies to get... with a horrific number of spawns around it AND in it. Dragons and other baddies outside of it, maybe undead crewmates in it?

Aggro undead crewmates. Two to three per room.

And a quest where you can board some of these ships, find living crewmates who beg you to take them home to their respective aetherbubbles, which you get paid for. Like the pilgrims and bards and scholars quest.

That seems fun to me.

This already exists. It's a bitch to get off, but then it should be. We don't really want PK interfering with yet another aspect of Lusternia.

That said, the ability to -voluntarily- change ships would be pretty cool, it took us like 5-10 minutes to swap a crewmember the one time we tried.

still think the gold rewards need some tweaking to the "buff me" side... and pleeeease put a price-list on Facility! it'd be amazing. otherwise, I'm liking the aethership changes so far. A dragon nets me 0.01% at titan, which isn't too bad... though Astral/muud is still far far faster. I'm not sure if there are any aetherbeasts that are worth more than Dragons... can someone confirm this?

The berth change lets you set your home dock. I imagine it only works on the aetherplex or prime dock your ship is linked to but haven't tested it. You can fuse back to your berth if you're on the prime plane. Not sure if your ship returns there when it implodes or if it disappears when the ship implodes or what. But right now it's a home flashpoint kind of deal.

It's 90% of the time impossible to get back to your ship if you board another ship. If you do manage to board an enemy ship the enemy ship's commander needs to move just one or two rooms and the crew can't get back (assuming that the entire crew boarded the enemy ship).

Though random, I'd love to have the ability to teleport to others on other ships (While only in aetherspace). Teleport to an unaware enemy crew member, then get your crew to teleport to you...mmm.

Second part sounds like it could be an empathic ability.

Good feedback. I will make it impossible to edit rooms/exits on aetherships while sailing.

think he means that the commander needs to -fly- one or two rooms >.>